I muddled up speaking and singing in my example. I meant speaking all the way through.

As for the scope for fooling ourselves: I start to suspect that that’s part of the necessary learning process in the alexander technique. Basically we start of fooling ourselves and having little sparks of insight through lessons and study, which we then refine into some new form of fooling ourselves, which might be a bit more constructive than the old way of fooling ourselves and so on

Cheers
Oliver

It was great to read your response to what I wrote. I think it all boils down to having a sense of realism about how we apply the Technique to our lives. In my view, there’s lots of scope for fooling ourselves in this area!

Nicholas

I’m struggling with this myself right at the moment and I think I’m about to come to the same conclusion as you.

This idea of receiving a stimulus and not reacting to it right away, is all very nice but what about the fact, that in real life we are in the middle of reacting to a number of stimuli already at any given point in time. Whatever I want to do – I’m doing something already and chances are, that I’m interfering with what I’m already doing even before I start the new activity. Then there is the added point, that every activity consists of a relationing movement of the axial structure and a gestural movement. As long as I’m not lying down the relationing movement is constantly going on (and to be quite honest I think even then I’m still interfering).

To take Alexanders classical example: If I’m just standing up and I want to start to speak and wanted to improve the use of myself while singing, I would have to find a way to stand up in a way in which I’m not interfering, because just standing up without interfering with my proper use is a problem for me already. How can I do that if not by learning to become aware of interferences an stopping them while standing up? The only other way than your suggestion I could think of right now, would be to lie down and get up with improved use and then start singing, which seems a bit weird to me …

Thanks for this input and keep up the good work.
Oliver